A Kind of Vanishing

by Lesley Thomson

  The Office Toilets

  A woman runs a cleaning company; leasing cheap offices in Shepherds Bush, she has no control over the common areas. She has complained to the landlord about the unisex toilets, they give a terrible impression to clients. She should find new premises but she has become distracted by a murder case. The ‘facts’ are: the sanitary-ware is salmon pink and the roller mechanism is broken so that the towel spools onto the lino. These details may or may not feature in the novel. But I know they are there.

  THE PURLOINED PLACE:

  IN The Poetics of Space (1958) Gaston Bachelard describes how by polishing a table we develop a relationship with it that heightens its ‘reality’. It finds a place in our world beyond its utilitarian function of ‘table’. I watch a wall being built: it is comprised not only of bricks and mortar, but of the conversation I had with the young man who built it and of my thoughts as he lay each course. To me it is more than a wall.

  This leads me to the second reason for taking photographs. I ‘take’ the real location in a photograph and make it fictional. The real place becomes the fictional location. When I visit the toilets in the last image, like Lucy in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the wardrobe has no back: I have entered the cleaning company and my story is not make-believe.

  I build a relationship with the location or with objects. My memories of the place are layered with the experiences of my characters. When I visit Tide Mills I ‘remember’ playing hide and seek there. I look for Alice and Eleanor in the undergrowth, through holes in walls, or running along the beach. When I am by the River Thames I am no longer in the present. I am no longer ‘present’.

  Major Incident Document

  This is a photocopied page from the file of a murdered woman. Her strangled body was found at the spot marked with an ‘X’ in the summer of 1981. Decades later, in 2010, a woman sits in an empty house late at night. She smoothes out this crumpled sheet and by the light of an angle-poise lamp examines this image.

  The Place by the River Thames

  Blinding sunshine bakes the mud to clay. Sunk into its surface are brick, twists of rope, broken bottles; flotsam and jetsam. Along the top of the wall is a trellis, a glimpse of a shrub, signifying prosaic domesticity beyond the frame of the image. Here is generic familiarity: weeds sprout from a retaining wall that is held fast with steel bolts. Some bricks are green with moss and slime, the strata pattern marking the high water levels.

  I have purloined this place: in broad daylight its truth is hidden. It could be a typical riverside scene, altered little over the last 150 years. It is not. It is a shot taken by a detective and later it is given a file number. Its secret is revealed to you, the reader. If you make your way down the Bell Steps – three up, twelve down – you too might become enter the story and forge your own memories. This where a woman’s life ended. This is a ‘fact’ that you may recall.

  In 2010 my character pulls the the black and white photocopy out of her jacket pocket. She positions herself so she can see what the photographer saw.

  In 2011, yet another woman is here. She snaps pictures, she makes notes in a spiral-bound book, describing the cloying odour of river mud wafting in the still air. Later she deletes ‘wafting’. A person died here, she tells herself. Standing where the body was found, I believe my own story.

  BEYOND THE RECORD:

  THE THIRD reason I take pictures is to discover what I did not see through the lens.

  In Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 thriller, a photographer roaming a London park unwittingly witnesses a murder. He only sees this when he enlarges his picture. As he ‘shoots’ a couple around corners, down steps, from behind fences, the only sound is the rushing of a breeze in the trees. I had not particularly noticed this before I saw the film. Now I hear it and I am in the film.

  I enlarge my images and I see what I was meant to see.

  The Leaning Woman

  The Leaning Woman, a sculpture by Karel Vogel, was erected beside the Great West Road in 1959. She sits on a plinth beside a churchyard, three minutes’ walk from the river where the woman’s body was found. As I examine the shot, I discern marks on the pockmarked concrete. I click the magnifying glass icon until the screen is a mass of grey and brown pixels.

  The Jointed Carcass

  Chalk lines have been scrawled over the woman’s body, an attempt to erase them unsuccessful. I am told that these segments represent a butcher’s jointing of a carcass. My photograph has connected two realities: the actual and the invented. My murderer has been here at night when there is no one around and drawn these lines.

  OFF THE RECORD:

  THESE ARE images from my characters’ points of view. They are snatches of their lives. They contribute to their back story. To take these pictures I have entered my characters’ lives. I sip a cup of coffee and eat pancakes with syrup in a McDonald’s in Earl’s Court before getting into the cab of the first District Line train of the day. As I eat I avoid the eye of other drivers – they know to leave me alone – I am my character. I know what it is like to clamber over the flint wall, trampling on nettles and rough grass before crouching down. If anyone looks over the wall they will see me. I have to assume they will not. I rest a bunch of flowers against a headstone, seeing for myself that the engraving on the stone is almost obscured by lichen. As I sit on a hillside with my notebook, I ponder the best cleaning agent for removing lily stamen stains from silk.

  My characters are based on real life. I am the actor.

  The Woman’s View

  This scrap of beach by the Thames is revealed as the tide ebbs. A woman contemplates the spans on Hammersmith Bridge, they seem to shimmer in the heat. Her husband, a civil engineer, has told her that the bridge was designed by the man who created the London sewers and opened by the Prince of Wales in 1887. Her thoughts lead her to the present Prince of Wales. Charles is getting married today.

  I look at this photograph and forget that I took it. The point of view is not mine.

  The Driver’s View

  A man with the mind of a murderer prefers darkness. He drives a London Underground train, working the Dead-Late shift on the District line. Many tunnels have not changed in over a hundred years. Always walking, always driving, he is never in one place.

  He is always absent.

  The Detective’s View

  Twenty-nine years on, a retired detective obsesses about an unsolved murder. Parked by the sea, he takes stock of what he has just learnt. He drinks coffee from his flask and, given to snacking, eats a Kit-Kat. He has a lead and imagines telling his daughter, but, grown up and grown away, she is a stranger. Absently he writes her name in steam from the cup on his windscreen. His daughter will never know her Dad did this.

  As I slowly sip the scalding liquid, I am the detective.

  The Boy’s View

  A three-year-old boy studies ants scurrying to and fro across the path and positions twigs that are tree trunks to divert them. He likes the twig’s curve in relation to the square border stones. The lines in between are paths, they are short cuts, escape routes. People are not as clever as ants, he ponders. Unlike ants, their behaviour makes no sense to him. Alive with possibility this landscape is his.

  The Man’s View

  A man comes out of the Co-op in a seaside town. It is eight-thirty-five am. He carries two soft ham rolls and a tin of coke in a plastic bag for his lunch. He has a massive heart attack. This picture is his last conscious sight.

  As I gaze at this snatch of pavement I see a life passing before me.

  The Beginning

  These images are part of my process of writing novels. I have taken reality for use in my fiction. Using photographs such as these I believe my fiction is reality.

  Then I begin to write…

  About the Author

  Lesley Thomson is the author of Seven Miles from Sydney, a crime thriller set in Australia. She also co-wrote actress Sue Johnston’s autobiography Hold on to the Messy Times. She grew up
in London and now lives with her partner in Lewes, East Sussex.

  Praise

  ‘Thomson skilfully evokes the era and the slow-moving quality of childhood summers, suggesting the menace lurking just beyond the vision of her young protagonists. A study of memory and guilt with several twists.’

  Guardian

  ‘A thoughtful, well-observed story about families and relationships and what happens to both when a tragedy occurs. It reminded me of Kate Atkinson. Thomson is particularly good at capturing the minutiae of childhood as well as the secrets, the lies, the make-believe, the jealousies and spitefulness, the confusion and wonder of being nine years old.’

  Scott Pack

  ‘Lesley Thomson’s engaging writing style skilfully explores the obsession and the sense of guilt, hope and despair, trust and mistrust that will fill the lives of all the people who once knew the girl who disappeared. A masterful exploration of human feelings that is paired with an equally masterful description of the settings that form the background to this gripping story. Full of unexpected twists, this is a crime story that will leave you wondering until the end whether a crime has, in fact, been committed at all.’

  Book After Book

  ‘Such is the vividness of the descriptions of the location in this well structured and well written novel that I want to get the next train down. Just when one thinks one can guess where it is leading, it switches, and the conclusion is a tense and gripping one. On the edge of my seat? No way – I was cowering under it.’

  Amy Myers, Shotsmag

  Skilfully lays the foundations in the earlier chapters for what is to come. Each layer of the plot is carefully interwoven with the thoughts, wishes and desires of the main characters. Years pass culminating in the explosion of a shocking truth. If you enjoy a good thriller with more twists and turns than a corkscrew, I recommend it.’

  The Parkinson

  ‘Complex, disturbing and surprising… the sort of book where you simply have to completely rethink what you thought was going to happen – before sleeping with the lights on.’

  Candis Magazine

  ‘The characterisation is particularly excellent. A sensitively written story, evocatively described, this is also an unusual thriller in that it easily bears a second reading.’

  The Argus

  ‘There is a touch of Susan Hill or Ruth Rendell in her (Barbara Vine) gothic mode here. Very well written.’

  Abbey’s Bookshop, Sydney

  Copyright

  First edition published in 2007

  This ebook edition published in 2011 by

  Myriad Editions

  59 Lansdowne Place

  Brighton BN3 1FL

  www.MyriadEditions.com

  Copyright © Lesley Thomson 2007, 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the

  British Library.

  ISBN: 978–0–9565599–9–9

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